business

I’ve been with Softlayer over four years now. It’s been a journey that has taken me around the world—from Dallas to Singapore to Washington D.C, and back again. Along the way, I’ve met amazingly brilliant people who have helped me sharpen the tools in my ‘data center toolbox’ thus allowing me to enhance the customer experience by aiding and assisting in a complex compute environment.

I like to think of our data centers as masterpieces of elegant design. We currently have 14 of these works of art, with many more on the way. Here’s an insider’s look at the design:

Keeping It Cool

Our POD layouts have a raised floor system. The air conditioning units chill from the front bottom of the servers on the ‘cold rows’ passing through the servers on the ‘warm rows.’ The warm rows have ceiling vents to rapidly clear the warm air from the backs of the servers.

Jackets are recommended for this arctic environment.

Pumping up the POWER

Nothing is as important to us as keeping the lights on. Every data center has a three-tiered approach to keeping your servers and services on. Our first tier being street power. Each rack has two power strips to distribute the load and offer true redundancy for redundant servers and switches with the remote ability to power down an individual port on either power strip.

The second tier is our batter backup for each POD. This offers emergency response for seamless failover when street power is no more.

This leads to the third step in our model, generators. We have generators in place for a sustainable continuity of power until street power has returned. Check out the 2-megawatt diesel generator installation at the DAL05 data center here.

The Ultimate Social Network

Neither power nor cooling matter if you can’t connect to your server, which is where our proprietary networking topography comes to play. Each bare metal server and each virtual server resides in a rack that connects to three switches. Each of those switches connects to an aggregate switch for a row. The aggregate switch connects to a router.

The first switch, our private backend network, allows for SSL and VPN connectivity to manage your server. It also gives you the ability to have server-to-server communication without the bounds of bandwidth overages.

The second switch, our public network, provides pubic Internet access to your device, which is perfect for shopping, gaming, coding, or whatever you want to use it for. With 20TB of bandwidth coming standard for this network, the possibilities are endless.

The third and final switch, management, allows you to connect to the Intelligent Platform Management Interface that provides tools such as KVM/hardware monitoring/and even virtual CDs to install an image of your choosing! The cables to your devices from the switches are color-coded, port-number-to-rack-unit labeled, and masterfully arranged to maximize identification and airflow.

A Soft Place for Hardware

The heart and soul of our business is the computing hardware. We use enterprise grade hardware from the ground up. We offer our smallest offering of 1 core, 1GB RAM, 25GB HDD virtual servers, to one of our largest quad 10-core, 512GB RAM, multi 4TB HDD bare metal servers. With excellent hardware comes excellent options. There is almost always a path to improvement. Meaning, unless you already have the top of the line, you can always add more. Whether it be additional drive, RAM, or even processor.

I hope you enjoyed the view from the inside. If you want to see the data centers up close and personal, I am sorry to say, those are closed to the public. But you can take a virtual tour of some of our data centers via YouTube: AMS01 and DAL05

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the newest SoftLayer data center in Melbourne, Australia! This facility is our first on the continent (with Sydney planned for later in the year), and it delivers that trademark SoftLayer service to our clients Down Under.

Our Aussie Mates

Over the years, our customer base has grown phenomenally in Australia, and it should come as no surprise that customers in the region have been clamoring for a SoftLayer data center Down Under to bring high performance cloud infrastructure even closer to them. These customers have grown to immense proportions with ahead-of-their-time value propositions and innovative ideas that have turned heads around the world.

A perfect example of that kind of success is HotelsCombined.com, an online travel platform designed to streamline the process of searching for and reserving hotel rooms around the world. Their story is nothing short of brilliant. A startup in 2005, they today serve more than 25 million visitors a month, has more than 20,000 affiliates, and a database of 800,000+ properties worldwide.

HotelsCombined.com partnered with SoftLayer to provision bare metal servers, virtual servers, load balancers, and redundant iSCSI storage around the world to best serve their global customer base. Additionally, they implemented data warehouse and predictive analytics capabilities on SoftLayer for their real-time predictive models and business intelligence tools.

Another great story is that of The Loft Group. I wrote about how they chose our cloud platform to roll out their Digital Learning Platform in a previous blog. They needed performance, analytics, monitoring, and scalability to accommodate their massive growth, and we were able to help.

Benefiting Down Under

Many of you have seen news about IBM’s plans to expand SoftLayer into Australia for a few months now. In fact, at the recent IBM Cloud Pre-Launch event (view the full event on demand here), Lance Crosby shared our vision for the region and the synergy that we are looking to create in the market.

Our expansion into Melbourne means that our customers have even more choice and flexibility when building their cloud infrastructure on our platform. With Australian data residency, many of our customers in Australia with location-sensitive workloads or regulatory/compliance data requirements immediately benefit from the new location. Additionally, with network points of presence in Sydney and Melbourne, users in Australia will see even better network performance when connecting to servers in any SoftLayer data center around the world. Users looking for additional redundancy in APAC have another location for their data, and customers who want to replicate data as though they are in the same rack can do so between Australia and one of our other locations.

Let the Bash Commence

To celebrate this exciting milestone, we have quite a few things lined up for the region. First up, a special promotion for all those who would like to check out the performance of this facility—new customers and our existing loyalists. You can get US$500 off on your first month's order (bare metal, private virtual, public virtual—anything and everything listed in our store!) for the Melbourne data center. More details on the promo, features, and services are available here.

Next up—parties! We have a couple of networking events planned. SoftLayer customers, partners, enthusiasts, and friends are invited to join us in Melbourne on October 9, and Auckland, New Zealand, on October 15 for a fun evening with SLayers and peers. If you’re in the area and want more details, email us at marketingAP@softlayer.com with the following information:

Subject: I Would Like to Attend SoftLayer Night: Celebrating Data Centre Go-Live

Body: Your Name, contact phone number, city where you would like to attend, and one line about why you would like to attend.

Space is limited, and you don’t have much time to reserve your spot, so let us know as soon as possible.

These are exciting times. I’m extremely eager to see how Australian businesses leverage these new in-country facilities and capabilities. Stay tuned for new stories as we hear from other happy customers.

Today marks the 15th anniversary of National Techies Day—originally started to encourage students to learn more about a career in technology.

To be honest, we get teary-eyed when we hear young techies say they want to be a computer programmer, engineer, or a web developer when they grow up. Techies define, redefine, and refine the world, and the future techies will push the limits further than we ever imagined. How exciting!

At SoftLayer, National Techies Day has a special place deep in our HeartLayer. If you frequent our blog regularly or follow us on Twitter, you’ve seen us mention “Innovate or Die” once or twice . . . or a hundred times. It’s our motto. And, really when you break it down, National Techies Day celebrates technology and innovation and the people that keep us moving forward; for without innovation, we truly become stagnant.

So this National Techies Day we’d like to thank all the trailblazers who came before us. For all those who were teased and called nerd and geek, we thank you; for now we proudly wear these classifications as badges of honor.

We’d like to thank all the tech CEOs for making it socially acceptable to wear jeans and t-shirts to work every day; I am literally wearing a SoftLayer t-shirt and jeans right now as I type, so thanks.

We’d also like to remind all the non-techies out there to give a big shout-out to your IT department techies for getting you back online when you get the dreaded blue screen or experience other equally terrifying “my PC is acting up” situations. (“Did you try turning it off and on again?”)

And finally, to all the kids out there who know how to operate every technological device at home better than their parents, let us just say, working in technology is totally awesome (!), and we can’t wait to see what great things y’all will come up with in the future.

For the past two days, SoftLayer set up shop at the 2014 cPanel® Conference held in Houston, TX. We mingled. We administered the Server Challenge II (more on that later) . . . And, we talked to Aaron Phillips, chief business officer at cPanel.

Holy cup of coffee; this guy has so much energy! Clad in shorts, a t-shirt, and Adidas Gazelle’s, this CBO was not what I expected, but neither is cPanel for that matter. Reading Phillips’ bio offers a glimpse into the cPanel culture; he pokes fun at the fact he never thought he would be working for a “company started by a 14-year-old genius.”(Maybe that’s why he can get away with the shorts.)

Regardless, you can’t dismiss cPanel’s expertise when it comes to specializing in control panel software. The cPanel software package automates server tasks by providing an accessible interface to help website owners manage their sites.

So Aaron, can you give us a brief overview of what the cPanel conference is all about?

The cPanel Conference is in its ninth year, and we really put this together to network, talk about web hosting, and give our partners a sneak peek at what we’re up to. I attended the event even before I came onboard at cPanel, and each year just gets bigger and better. It’s the conference I look forward to each year.

Oh yeah? Any big announcements this week?

Yep. We have a new update to our system. Our user interface is available in 29 languages. It’s really going to help our global customers and help our partners that have global customers like SoftLayer.

How so?

The quality of translations have improved dramatically. The older system we called LANG often created partial sentences which caused a lot of problems with translations. Our ‘newer model,’ Maketext, is more flexible and feature rich. We’ve also edited our content on the interface making it easier to translate. This also eases translation in languages read from right-to-left.

When do you anticipate a go-live date?

We’re in the beta stage but will be complete soon. Like, any day now.

Speaking of SoftLayer, what does cPanel think of us?

You guys were one of our first customers, and you’re one of our biggest customers. We go way back . . . like EV1 days. We love you guys over at SoftLayer. Enjoy the conference! Gotta run.

[Maybe that’s why he wears the Gazelle’s].

Speaking the Language – 29 Languages

Arabic

French

Japanese

Spanish

Chinese

German

Korean

Swedish

Czech

Greek

Latin American Spanish

Thai

Danish

Hebrew

Malay

Traditional Chinese

Dutch

Hungarian

Norwegian

Turkish

English

Iberian Spanish

Polish

Ukrainian

Filipino

Indonesian

Portuguese

Vietnamese

Finnish

Italian

Romanian

The Server Challenge II Continues to Kick aaS and Take Names
We don’t like to brag, but we have the best booth setup of all time. Why? Because of the Server Challenge II. We would like to congratulate Mike Levine, Product Manager at OpenSRS (with the high score of 1:00.05) who beat out the hundreds of contenders who participated at the 2014 cPanel Conference.

We want to give you an update and some more information on maintenance taking place right now with SoftLayer public and private node virtual servers.

As the world is becoming aware today, over the past week a security risk associated with Xen was identified by the Xen community and published as Xen Security Advisory 108 (XSA-108).

And as many are aware, Xen plays a role in our delivery of SoftLayer virtual servers.

Eliminating the vulnerability requires updating software on host nodes, and that requires downtime for the virtual servers running on those nodes.

Yeah, that’s not something anyone likes to hear. But customer security is of the utmost importance to us, so not doing it was not an option.

As soon as the risk was identified, our systems engineers and technology partners have been working nonstop to prepare the update.

On Sunday we notified every customer account that would be affected that we would have emergency maintenance in the middle of this week, and updated that notice each day.

And then yesterday we published that the maintenance would begin today at 3pm UTC, with a preliminary order of how the maintenance would roll out across all of our data centers.

We are updating host nodes data center by data center to complete the emergency maintenance as quickly as possible. This approach will minimize disruption for customers with failover infrastructure in multiple data centers.

Selling SoftLayer services to Internet-centric companies—hosting resellers, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers, big data and e-commerce companies—are no-brainers. These companies clearly see the advantages that come with having their servers (the backbone of their business) hosted by a specialist. They switch their capital expenses into variable costs that can be spread over time.

On the flip side are companies in non-Internet-centric industries—banking, health care, oil & gas, and aerospace. How do these companies find value in the IaaS offered by SoftLayer? The IT infrastructure (servers to be precise) accounts for less than 5 percent of their capital expenditure (CAPEX) as opposed to almost 95 percent for Internet-centric companies.

Will the same value proposition work for both Internet-centric and non-Internet-centric companies?

With Internet-centric companies (where servers constitute up to 95 percent of CAPEX), the majority of the workforce is server-savvy. This means there is a very high chance any contact we have with these companies will be with a server-savvy fellow. Selling SoftLayer will then be a question of how SoftLayer’s USPs differentiate from the competition.

The current industry trend is driving a faulty message: The cloud is a commodity.

The truth is: Unlike basic commodities (electricity, gas, or cable), where there is little or no differentiation between what the end user gets irrespective of the provider, cloud and hosting in general are different. This faulty commodity-based assumption drives the price wars in cloud computing.

Comparing apples and oranges cumulus and stratus.

To test and disprove this theory, I brought a customer’s systems engineer (a server expert) into a sales discussion with the CTO.

I requested to put the price negotiations on hold for about 4 hours, and evaluate the services first. To do this, I asked for the exact configuration that the customer had hosted with a competitor. I ordered the exact configuration on the SoftLayer platform and within 2 hours the servers were ready. When the customer’s system engineer tested the performance of the SoftLayer server and compared it to what they had from a competitor, the price comparison was thrown out the window for good.

There are many different facets wherein SoftLayer outperforms the competition but unfortunately, most prospective customers only see price.

For the non-Internet-centric companies, to reach the price discussion is a milestone in itself. Pricing negotiations only begin when the need and suitability (originality) have been established.

The IBM and SoftLayer effect.

As a salesperson, I subscribe to the SCOTSMAN Sales Qualification Matrix (Solution, Competition, Originality, Timescales, Size, Money, Authority, and Need). Most companies in this group need solutions. IaaS is just part of that solution. This is where IBM (Big Blue) comes into the picture. As a service giant in the IT Sector, IBM can and will build on SoftLayer’s IaaS prowess to conquer this landscape. The synergies that are coming from this acquisition will send shockwaves across the industry.

Question is: Will the stakeholders maximize this potential to the fullest?

If you guys have read any of my other blogs, I’m sure you’ll notice a pattern: rather than discussing opinions or news of new technologies, more often than not, I like to write more in the form of tutorials and hands-on exercises that demonstrate either fundamentals or new tips and tricks that I have learned.

In this blog, I’d like to discuss HTML5. I know, I know, it’s not exactly a subject that’s brand new. However, with as many HTML5 implementations as there are out there, and throughout many discussions, I’ve realized that many of the most talented Web developers have had to return to the basics of HTML5 features and techniques in order to redesign projects the same way they developed them.

Simply put: If we forget what we’ve done and scripted for over two decades with previous HTML versions and return to the basics, we can re-learn a new foundation that is sure to make us stronger developers and smarter engineers.

I. Declaration of Independence … or at least a declaration you don’t have to spend hours memorizing!

One of the most raved about features of HTML5 (and yet one of the simplest new features) is the new Doctype. How many of you had to Google the standard Doctype every single time you started a new project? Or perhaps you kept the tag in a code bin for easy copy/pasting? Well, no more!

Of course the actual strict/transitional or html/xhtml would vary depending on your page, but they pretty much worked the same way.

The new HTML5 way:

<!DOCTYPE html>

Done. I know it seems like such a simple thing, but returning to the foundation of what we learned so many years ago and re-learning them in the new HTML5 way will not only strengthen our sites, but it will also build a brand new foundation of flexibility and efficiency. Technology evolves at such a rapid pace that if we don’t keep up, we’re going to be left chasing the wagon of the future.

II. Editable content WITHOUT JavaScript!

HTML5 has added so many advanced features that our need for jQuery can be cut by nearly a third (depending on our requirements of course), which in turn greatly reduces the overhead of the browser’s need to process a ton of jQuery functions. If we utilize just a few of HTML5’s awesome new jQuery-like features, we can speed up our site and keep our .js scripts smaller!

Just for giggles (if you’re not familiar with HTML5’s editable content), give this a try:

Put that into an .html file, and open it up in your favorite browser. You’ll see what should look like this:

A simple list of course. In the years of your career I’m sure you’ve made tens of thousands of these. What’s cool about this list, if you’re not familiar with all of HTML5’s neat little tricks, is that this list is editable. Go ahead and try clicking on the list item and replace the names; even add your own name!

As you can see, I didn’t have the heart to remove any of our most frequent bloggers, so I just appended my name to Mark Quigley (of course, that’s not my true SoftLayer Blog ranking, but one day soon … it shall be!)
This feature may not save the user’s edits, but if you add in some nifty HTML5 storage abilities (local or session), you could have yourself a pretty robust application!

III. Beautiful placeholders to hold a place for my heart.

One of my biggest gripes every time I’d either design or program a user interface (registration, account functionality) was the fact that I would have to integrate a jQuery function just to add a little bit of extra help with the text boxes. Placeholders never worked as they should. Sometimes we just didn’t have enough real estate on the page for the amount of instruction as we needed, which meant another placeholder maker for jQuery.

HTML5 now comes equipped with beautiful support for placeholder text (well, I suppose it depends on your POV on designing/developing forms. If you do it as much as I do, the new placeholders are the holy grail of usable forms!). A very simple preview of what HTML form life was like before HTML5 (without the jQuery function to add text to just one input box):

The fact is: Sometimes we don’t always have the real estate that we would like to provide the user enough instructions to clarify what needs to be done!

This simple form could end up being very confusing for the user. It’s so simple, yet there are several ways to enter a phone number, and depending on the backend, it may only accept one format.

Just by adding the simple placeholder attribute, we have now cleared up exactly what format we need the phone number! Now let’s have a look:

It’s funny how a simple, light-colored demonstration of acceptable input can really beautify a form and increase usability. With the placeholder attribute in place in this example, I’m not even sure it’s necessary to have the instruction text on the right, as we can clearly see we need 10 digits, with parenthesis and dashes.

Well my friends, looking at the word count of this document, it looks like this blog is coming to a close, and I’ve only gone over three of my favorite foundational features of HTML5, so you know what that means … Part 2!

When I came on board at SoftLayer, the company was at the beginning of a growth period. IBM had just invested $1.2 billion to build 15 new data centers all over the world including one in Hong Kong—I was excited to get to work there!

Before I joined the Hong Kong data center’s Go Live Team as a server build tech, I went through a lengthy interview process. At the time, I was working for a multinational bank. But after the Chinese New Year, something inside me said it was time to take on a new challenge. Many people in Chinese cities look for new opportunities around the New Year; they believe it will give them luck and fortune.

After much anticipation (and interviews and paperwork), my first day was finally here. When I arrived at the SoftLayer data center, I walked through glass security doors and was met by Jesse Arnold, SoftLayer’s Hong Kong site manager; Russell Mcguire, SoftLayer’s Go Live Team leader whom I met during my interview process; and Shahzad, my colleague who was also starting work that day.

Shahzad and I felt very welcomed and were excited to be joining the team. During our first-day tour, I took a deep breath and said to myself, “You can do this Ying! This is transition, and we never stop learning new things in life.” Learning new things can be challenging. It involves mental, physical, and emotional strength.

Inside the Data Center: Building Racks!

When our team began to build racks and work with cables it was uncharted, but not totally unfamiliar territory for me. For a time, I worked as a seafarer cadet electrician on a container ship. I have worked with cables, electric motors, and generators before—it was just in the middle of the ocean. So, needless to say I know cables, but SFP cables were new. With the help of my colleagues and the power of the Internet, I was on my way and cabling the data center in no time.

When we build a server, we check everything: the motherboard, processors, RAM, hard drives, and most importantly, OS compatibility. After learning those basics, I started to look at it like a big puzzle that I needed to solve.

Inside the Data Center: Strong Communication!

That wasn’t the only challenge. In order to do my job successfully and adhere to data center build procedures, I had to learn the best way to communicate with my colleagues.

In the data center, our team must relay messages precisely and provide all the details to ensure every step in the build-out process is done correctly. Jesse constantly reminds us what is important: communication, communication, communication. He always repeats it three times to emphasize it as a golden rule. To me, this is one sign of a successful leader. I’m glad Jesse has put a focus on communication because it is helping me learn what makes a good leader and SLayer.

Inside the Data Center: Job Satisfaction!

I am so happy to be working at SoftLayer. All the new challenges I’ve been faced with remind me of Nike’s slogan: Just Do It! And our young team is doing just that. We work six days a week for 14 hours a day. And for all of that time, I use my mental and physical strength to tackle my new job.

I’ve learned so much and am excited to expand the knowledge base I already have, so I can be a stronger asset to the SoftLayer team.

I consider myself a SLayer that is still-in-training because there is more to being a SLayer than just building racks. SLayers are the dedicated people that work at SoftLayer, and they’re my colleagues. As my training continues, I look forward to learning more and to continue gaining more skills. I don't want to get old without learning new things!

For all our readers in Asia below you will find the blog in Mandarin translation!

Why it's OK to be a server-hugger—a cloud server hugger.

(This is the final post in a three-part series. Read the first and second posts here.)

By now, you probably understand the cloud enough to know what it is and does. Maybe it's something you've even considered for your own business. But you're still not sold. You still have nagging concerns. You still have questions that you wish you could ask, but you're pretty sure no cloud company would dignify those questions with an honest, legitimate response.

Well we’re a cloud company, and we’ll answer those questions.

Inspired by a highly illuminating (!) thread on Slashdot about the video embedded below, we've noticed that some of you aren't ready to get your head caught up in the cloud just yet. And that's cool. But let's see if maybe we can put a few of those fears to rest right now.

“[The] reason that companies are hesitant to commit all of their IT to the cloud [relates to] keeping control. It's not about jobs, it's about being sure that critical services are available when you need them. Whenever you see ‘in the CLOUD!’, mentally replace it with ‘using someone else's server’—all of a sudden it looks a whole lot less appealing. Yes, you gain some flexibility, but you lose a LOT of control. I like my data to not be in the hands of someone else. If I don't control the actual machine that has my data on it, then I don't control the data.”

You guys are control FREAKS! And rightfully so. But some of us actually don't take that away from you. Believe it or not, we make it easier for you.

In fact, sometimes you even get to manage your own infrastructure—and that means you can do anything an employee can do. You'll probably even get so good at it that you'll wonder why we don't pay you.

But it doesn't stop at mere management. Oh, no, no, no, friends. You can even take it one further and build, manage, and have total control over your very own private cloud of virtual servers. Yes, yours, and yours only. Now announcing you, the shot caller.

The point is, you don't lose control over your data in the cloud. None. 'Cause cloud companies don't play like that.

“The first rule of computer security is physical access, which is impossible with cloud services, which means they are inherently insecure.”

Curious. So since you can't physically touch your money in your bank account, does that mean it's a free-for-all on your savings? Let us know; we'll bring buckets.

“These cloud guys always forget to mention one glaring problem with their model— they're not adding any new software to the picture.”

Ready for us to blow your minds? We're actually adding software all the time; you just don't see it—but you do feel it.

Your friendly Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers out there are doing a lot of development behind the scenes. An internal software update might let us deploy servers 10 minutes faster, for example. You won't see that, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. If you're happy with your servers, then rest assured you're seeing some sweet software in action. Some cloud companies aren't exclusively focused on software (think Salesforce), but that doesn't mean the software is dial-up grade.

“I personally don't trust the cloud. Think about it for a moment. You are putting your data on a server, and you have no clue as to where it is. You have no clue about who else is able to see that data, and you have no clue about who is watching as you access your data and probably no clue if that server is up to date on security patches.”

Just ask. Simply ask all these questions, and you'd have all these answers. Not to be cheeky, but all of this is information you can and do have a right to know before you commit to anything. We're not sure what makes you think you don't, but you do. Your own due diligence on behalf of your data makes that a necessity, not a luxury.

“As long as I'm accountable, I want the hardware and software under my control. That way when something goes wrong and my boss calls and asks 'WTF?', I can give him something more than ’Well I called Amazon and left a message with our account representative.’"

We can't speak for Amazon, but cloud companies often offer multiple ways you can get a hold of a real, live person because we get that you want to talk to us, like, yesterday. Yes, we totally get you. And we want to fix whatever ails you. In the cloud, that is.

But what makes you think we won't know when something goes wrong before you do? (Checkmate.)

“No matter how much marketing jargon you spew at people, ‘the cloud’ is still just a bunch of servers. Stop lying.”

The concept of "the cloud" is simply about where the servers are located and how you consume computing, storage, and networking resources. In "the cloud," your servers are accessed remotely via a network connection (often the Internet, for most of the clouds you know and love) as opposed to being locally accessed while housed in a server room or physical location on the company premises. Your premises, as in wherever you are while performing your computing functions. But no one's trying to pull the wool over your eyes with that one.

Think about it this way: If servers at your location are "on the ground," then servers away from your location can be considered "in the cloud." And that's all there is to it.

Did we help? Did we clear the cloudy haze? We certainly hope so.

But this is just the beginning, and our door is always open for you to question, criticize, and wax philosophical with us when it comes to all things cloud. So get at us. You can chat with us live via our homepage, message us or post up on Facebook, or sling a tweet at a SLayer. We've got real, live people manning their stations. Consider the gauntlet thrown.

To help developers understand the benefits of the cloud and how to make their business scalable with the Softlayer environment, SoftLayer, in partnership with e27, is excited to announce the SoftLayer Asia Roadshow. The roadshow will stop in five cities:

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — October 1, 2014

Jakarta, Indonesia — October 3, 2014

Hong Kong — October 8, 2014

Bangkok, Thailand — October 10, 2014

Singapore — October 15, 2014

Designed as a half-day workshop with SoftLayer product and technical mentors, attendees will interact with instructors on how SoftLayer solutions scale and perform the way they do. The team will also take you through real business cases of how technical teams improved their performances in industries such as e-commerce, social media, and mobile gaming.

What you can expect at the workshop:

Practical and technical advice that you can apply immediately to help resolve trouble spots and improve performance in your organization’s IT environment

Learn how SoftLayer servers are provisioned so that you can build your own public and private node virtual servers

Interested?

If you are a startup, developer, or an entrepreneur looking to hone your cloud skills then this workshop is for you. Since there are limited seats in each location, visit www.e27.co/softlayer to register, and the team will get back to you.